Been wanting to do an interactive/animated plot like the one here for a while (go to the Taylor example). Sage looks like a good program to generate animated graphics, but R is my primary language of choice as a statistician. I don’t want to learn another language just for a single feature (although the other features look good as well). For mathy stuff that require the likes of Mathematica (cannot be done in R), I’ll go to Sage. But for now, I’ll stick with R.

Check out the animation package in R and check out the examples here. It’s quite easy to create animations in R. Just create a series of plot (in png or jpeg format) and make them interactive via the convert command from ImageMagick to pack them into a gif file. We can also use mencoder to turn a series of plot into an avi file or convert to turn them into an mpeg file for inclusion in LaTeX documents or slides.